All language subtitles for BBC.Castrato.2006.WS.PDTV.XviD.MP3.MVGroup.org.en

Your young servant,
Silvestro Prittoni,

rejoicing in a voice
sufficiently good to practise music,

and wishing to retain it,

begs Your Serene Highness
to make it such

that he is without
those instruments which would allow
the change of voice to take place.

MUSIC: "Cara Sposa" by Handel

During the 18th century,

as many as 100,000 small boys
were castrated

to preserve
their high singing voices.

Of these, a mere handful became
the most famous singers of the age.

The world's first international
superstars,

they were perhaps the greatest
virtuoso singers ever heard
on Earth - the castrati.

But the mature castrato voice
didn't sound like a child,

nor did it sound like a woman.

# Cara sposa

# Amante cara... #

'Nothing in the whole of music is
as fine as the fresh young voice

'of a castrato.

'No woman's voice has the same
firmness, the same strength

'and the same smoothness. '

#.. Pianti miei... #

And it didn't sound like
a male countertenor or falsettist.

In this film, we are going
to explore the sound and the world

of the baroque operatic castrati,

and in a unique
scientific experiment,

will attempt to bring something
of this lost voice back to life.

#.. Pianti miei... #

'For the whole
of my adult singing life,

'I've been fascinated by the
castrati and the music they sang. '

These kings
of the 18th century operatic stage

were the richest, the most
highly sought-after, the most
extraordinarily virtuosic,

the most pursued - in many ways -
of all the singers we've ever heard.

And for 200 years now
they've been extinct.

The thing that made the castrato
voice special appears to be

the effect that that singer had
on the audience.

If one can understand something
about what the special nature
of that sound was,

it will help us understand
what it is that communicates
from one human being to another.

To do this to a child,
when every single moment,
every day of their lives would be,

frankly, adversely affected by it -

their physical appearance,
their early osteoporosis,

their lack of an ability
to reproduce.

It seems to me emotionally
not very cost-effective.

They are jealous, despicable,
fierce, effeminate,

gluttonous, covetous, cruel,

inconstant, suspicious,
furious, insatiable.

They cry like children if they are
left out of an entertainment.

The knife has indeed made them
chaste,

but this chastity
is of no service to them.

Nicholas Clapton, a countertenor
and castrato historian,

is the curator of a new exhibition
in London devoted to the German
composer Handel and his castrati.

Handel was the first great composer
to write Italian opera in England.

Handel was absolutely the business
as an opera composer,

and as such had enough clout
to hire the very finest singers,

including some of the greatest
castrati the world has ever known -

Caffarelli, Senesino,
Carestini, Guadagni.

The only one he never got hold of
was Farinelli.

I'd like you to meet three
gentlemen I like to think of
as friends of mine -

there's Farinelli,

and Senesino,

and Guadagni by the window.

Farinelli never worked for Handel.

Senesino did, for about 15 years,

and here he is on stage
in Handel's Rodelinda,

about to sing the most famous aria
from that opera - Dove Sei.

Guadagni was much younger
than the other two singers.

He was described as
"a wild and reckless singer",

and was accused of quite a few
amorous adventures while he was in
London. He was such a good actor,

that eventually he was famous
as Gluck's Orfeo.

Well, a baroque opera fanatic
might like to make out

that castrati were invented to sing
lots of notes on an 18th-century
stage. This is nonsense.

Castration has been used
as a punishment

and as a means of subjugation
for thousands of years.

We certainly know of eunuch choirs
in a Christian context

as early as the 4th century
in Constantinople.

And there they flourished

for more than 800 years, until
the time of the Fourth Crusade,

when Constantinople was sacked

by the forces
of Western Christendom,

and the castrati who had been
singing there with great fame

and considerable scandal

um... suddenly disappeared
off the face of the Earth.

But 400 years later, castrati
suddenly reappeared in Italy.

In 1589, Pope Sixtus V reorganised
the choir of St Peter's.

Castrati would now take the high
parts that had previously been sung

by either boys or falsettists.

Falsetto means a little false voice,
which is really grossly unfair,

because there's nothing false or
unnatural about a falsetto voice -

it's a perfectly normal function
of any adult male.

The irony is, however,

that it was the castrati
who came to be referred to as the
natural soprano - soprani naturali -

which seems very strange to us.

Nobody in Britain
understands both the natural
and the synthetic human voice

better than York University's
electronics professor, David Howard.

The voice of a castrato worked in
the same way mine or yours works.

SINGS UP A SCALE

This is a medical model
of the larynx,

which shows us the basic working
parts. This is the Adam's apple,

the part you can feel if you move
your finger up and down the throat.

But if we turn it and look into it,

we can see the vibrating
structures - the vocal folds -

and as they open and close like
this, they would be vibrating.

And these vibrations are very rapid.

SINGING DOWN A SCALE

If this was a boy's larynx,

the length of the vocal folds
is about 5mm.

In the case of women it's nearer 8mm,

and in a man it's 1.4cm.

So the boy's voice has small vocal
cords. The boy also has a small
mouth, or vocal tract, above that,

and he is able to produce a sound

which many would describe
as being pure, rather simple.

SINGS UP A SCALE

The woman's voice, with her larger
vocal cords,

is working into a mouth cavity
which is rather bigger...

SINGS UP A SCALE

.. and so she is able
to work with a larger range
of acoustic possibilities

in colouring the sound.

Men sing in a range
that's roughly an octave lower.

SINGS UP A SCALE

The man also has a vocal tract,
or mouth cavity, that's much bigger.

But men are able to sing
in the same way as a boy or woman

by using what's known as falsetto.

SINGS SCALE IN FALSETTO

To produce "a falsetto sound" -
like that - what I'm doing

is reducing the bulk of
the vocal cords that are vibrating.

And I'm doing that

by setting the vocal folds up,
so that if you were looking
straight into my larynx,

you'd see the vocal folds like this,
and they'd be vibrating like that.

we call that full body contact
of the vocal folds. But for falsetto,

we pull the bulk of the vocal fold
material out of the way

and only the top edges vibrate,

so we have a thin string,
and a thin string will vibrate
at a higher frequency.

The castrato voice was not falsetto.

The castrati had larynxes of boys,

and therefore
their natural pitch range was up
there with the boys and the women.

But in addition,
they had a man's vocal tract,

so they had all the sonic timbre
possibilities of a man and big lungs.

So their power source was huge.
They could sing high notes
and sing them for a long time.

ARIA WITH VIRTUOSO TRILLS

Of course, what people are really
interested in is the operation.

Here we've got three things with
which the operation was done -

a lancet, a cauterising iron
and a castratori.

This little pair of 18th century
secateurs

would have been used to remove
the whole of a child's scrotum
at one fell swoop.

It could, of course,
be heated to red heat as well,

to do the cut
and the cauterisation at once.

That was one method.

Another, neater method - if one
may use that word - a neater method

was to use a lancet

to make an incision in the scrotum

in order to cut
the seminal vesicles...

.. and then this little cauterising
iron, which looks like something
you might crimp a pastry with.

The consequence of castrating
a child before puberty is huge.

Testosterone comes primarily
from the testes,

and that loss of testosterone

has innumerable effects - obviously
you don't go into puberty properly,

your voice doesn't break,
you don't start growing a beard,

genital development doesn't occur.

They tended to grow tall,

because fusion of the growing ends
of the bones doesn't occur,

so they would have had very long
arms and very long legs,

and the chest goes on growing
as well.

They look pale, because testosterone
stimulates the bone marrow
to produce more blood

and they obviously have abnormal
fat deposition -

they don't get the massive muscle
enlargement you get with a man who
has normal testosterone secretion.

So their whole appearance would have
been hugely interesting, unusual.

They have the look of a crocodile,
the grin of an ape,

the legs of a peacock,
the paunch of a cow,

the shape of an elephant,
the brains of a goose,

the throat of a pig
and the tail of a mouse.

For Georgian Britain in particular,

the Italian operatic castrati

were a hugely problematic paradox.

Opera in this country has always
had a very mixed reception.

It was imported for precisely
the same reasons as it was attacked.

It was elitist, it was foreign,

it was sung, it was false.

What is there to fix attention?

Recitative that is not understood

and songs unintelligible from
complex sounds and want of
articulation.

As the Italian language
is looked upon

as a necessary part
of polite education,

and therefore, it is to be supposed,

understood by all
in this higher rank of life,

and as the Italian opera
is established solely
at the expense of these,

they who do not understand
the language need not go
to the entertainment,

nor do they have any right
to condemn those who do.

The castrati
are the epitome of Italian opera,

and, of course, they are also
the epitome of the problems
with Italian opera.

Castrati were halfway
to becoming women.

They weren't quite men.

And women in the 18th century
couldn't think for themselves.

They were totally irrational.
They needed managing by men.

If the castrati start influencing
the young dandies of the day,

it could be appalling
for Britain's future.

A curse
on this damned Italian pathic mode!

I hate this singing
in an unknown tongue.

It does our reason
and our senses wrong.

I curse the unintelligible ass
who may, for aught I know,

be singing Mass.

Catholicism was a major problem
for Georgian England.

In fact, it had been a major source
of hysteria since the Reformation.

Castrati, of course,
were these great Catholic figures.

There was a charge
levelled against them,

that what they sang in these operas

was actually Catholic messages
in disguise.

Anyone may see with half an eye

religion is more their business
than music.

Despite this widespread prejudice,

Italian opera, and the castrati, had
some dedicated champions in Britain.

In the 1770s,

music historian Charles Burney
travelled throughout Italy

in search of accurate information
about these singers.

But even then, this was a culture
shrouded in secrecy.

I enquired throughout Italy

at what place boys were chiefly
qualified for singing by castration,

but could get no certain knowledge.

I was told at Milan
that it was at Venice,

at Venice that it was at Bologna,

but at Bologna the fact was denied
and I was referred to Florence.

The operation, most certainly,

is against the law in all of these
places, as well as against nature,

and all the Italians
so much ashamed in it,

that in every province
they transfer it to some other.

Bologna looks melancholy,

though parts of it
are very magnificent and beautiful.

Clergy in very great abundance.

The church is immensely rich.

The church in Italy was one of the
first employers of the castrati,

but their attitude to the procedure
and the whole business

was very ambiguous,
not least because it had to be.

In the church's own canon law, any
mutilation - castration included -

was actually illegal,
and forbidden,

and anyone
who carried out castration

would be punished
by excommunication if found out.

And that was a terrible thing.

There's been an often-quoted figure

for how many boys were castrated
in any one year

at the height
of the craze for the castrati,

say in the 1720s and 1730s.

It was probably
about 4,000 per annum.

And this was a craze that lasted,
on and off, for a hell of
a long time in the 18th century.

So how about at least 100,000 boys
castrated in the service of music?

It is generally people
of the meanest description

who give their children
for such horrible mutilations

in the hope that they may be able
one day to support their parents.

The child would have been
restrained by several adults

and drugged
by what means they had then.

Sometimes they used to give
a certain quantity of opium
to persons designed for castration

whom they cut while they were in
their dead sleep

and took from them those parts which
nature took so great care to form.

But it was observed that most
of those who had been cut after
this manner died by this narcotic.

They pressed the jugular veins,

which made the party
so stupid and insensible

he fell into a kind of apoplexy,

and then the action could be
performed with scarce any pain
at all to the patient.

Well, maybe even the church wouldn't
have been a big enough power

to drive this gruesome operation
for several centuries on its own.

But it's an extraordinary
coincidence of musical history

that at the same time
as the castrati were first
coming to prominence in Italy

we have the birth of that
great baroque form of opera.

It was in opera, the most
spectacular cultural form
of post-Renaissance Italy,

that castrati were really
to make their mark.

And Bologna boasts
the country's oldest functioning
public opera house -

the Teatro Comunale,
built in the mid-18th century.

You can feel from this acoustic

what a wonderful place
it must have been to sing in.

You're a singer, aren't you? Why
don't you test it for yourself?

# Ombra mai fu... #

Oh, yes, that works. That's great!

La voce viaggia!.. Viaggia! Yes.

And of course, not only do we have
amazing things up here, this space,

but there's some pretty amazing
things downstairs, below the stage.

In the bowels of the theatre.

Stage machinery that is over
200 years old is still preserved

in the theatre's basement.
But the origins of opera itself

go back another two centuries,
to the 1590s.

It started from court entertainment

in such places

as Florence or Mantua.

And then it swiftly turned into

a fully staged entertainment

with recitative, arias

and ballet,

and scene design - it was, as
the Germans put it, Gesamtkunstwerk.

Very rapidly,

public paying theatres opened in
Venice, during Monteverdi's lifespan,

and the process was completed
from Orfeo, court opera,

to the paying opera in Venice -
from Orfeo
to L'Incoronazione Di Poppea.

And already in Orfeo
we have castrato. Correct.

In the prologue of Orfeo
there's a castrato, not a woman
as it would be today. Yes.

# lo la Musica son

# Ch'ai dolci accenti

# So far tranquillo

# Ogni turbato core

# Et hor di nobil ira
et hor d'amore

# Posso infiammar

# Le piu gelate menti... #

By 100 years later, we have
the operatic form, opera seria -
literally, serious opera -

completely developed,
completely fixed,

with long, showy arias and
with recitative to tell the story.

The classic opera seria plot was
drawn from myth, legend or history.

and the leading man, or primo uomo,
whether king, warrior,
hero or lover,

was invariably sung by a castrato.

# How silently, how slyly

# When once the scent is taken

# The huntsman tracks the spoor...

# When once the scent is taken

# The huntsman tracks the spoor... #

'I think the castrati satisfied
this request after advice.

'All that form of art,'

in all of its complements,
is highly artificial -

incredible, unlikely stories.

Lofty sceneries,
mechanisms like this,

allowing sudden appearances
or disappearances...

People flying through the air!
People flying.

A factory of dreams,
like cinema today.

Special effects -
they were terribly clever at that.

Yes, and the castrati were
the most artificial beings
within this artifice.

# Pack up your worries

# Lay down your head

# Venice will comfort you... #

Excuse me, that's a girl!
Don't you wish!

That's a girl. If I know anything,
I know girls, and that's a girl.

You're on the turn! There's
hope for you yet! Pretty practice.

Fine performance. Thank you, sir.
I'm told you're from Bologna.

Just outside, sir.

I thought you reached those notes
with perfect... Oh, go on!
You're a girl, aren't you?

Go on!

You can tell me!

I'll take that as a compliment on my
voice, sir. Oh, but you're a girl!

I was inspected by the bishop. Well,
the bishop's been celibate 53 years.
He wouldn't know the difference!

I won't tell anyone. Just admit it.
Perhaps you find me attractive, sir.

The ambiguity of sex -
they made sexual objects
both for corrupted noblemen,

and...

equally corrupt noblewomen!

No wonder that the ladies pay
They take it out another way

For though they lose
the power of harm

The women know they yet can charm

The footman, he may make 'em swell

Or beaux may all their secrets tell

But here each night
the amorous maid

Securely sins, of nought afraid!

'I don't want to be deeply boring,
but I'm slightly dubious of stories'

that we're told about these people,

because we know now
that libido is hugely affected

by testosterone secretion.

We know
the level of testosterone needed
to have normal sexual function,

which is not up to the normal level
but actually halfway down,

so that if you have less than half
the normal concentration
of testosterone,

sexual function
is seriously interfered with.

So the stories of them being lovers
of various aristocratic women -

I think the aristocratic women may
not have liked making love as much
as perhaps others, I don't know!

But they got a lot of kudos, perhaps,
from having these people
around their bedrooms,

like in Der Rosenkavalier, perhaps,

but I don't know whether they were...
I can't believe it's as effective as
we're led to believe. It's a story.

As they were unable
to father children,

the castrati were denied marriage
by law.

Social norms also denied them any
satisfying emotional relationships.

Bologna's favourite adopted son,
the greatest castrato of them all,
Farinelli,

left a touching record of falling
in love with a young ballerina.

Look, there. Ah! 1733. "Cupido... "

Oh, yes!

"Cupid again has me
bound in his chains. "

And here, he says, "God knows
when I will be set free. "

And he talks about those chains
being extremely sweet. Yes.

Typical, er, romantic language
of the period. Yes.

It's typical libertese. Yes.
In your excellent translation
something gets lost,

and these are the rhymes
and the rhythm.

Um, it's like a part of a libretto.

HE READS THE ITALIAN

Exactly, it could be an aria.
Like he was singing.

He was unhappy in Italy, in Bologna.
Really? Yes. He was unhappy here?

I think so. Because he had
no power... Yes. And he was alone.

Even if the villa
is always filled with people.

Yes, visitors. Visitors, relatives,
friends, but he was alone.

Farinelli died,
immensely wealthy but alone,

at the age of 78.

Soon after,
his original grave was destroyed.

Although his great-niece
arranged a re-burial,

nobody knew where
this new grave was, until recently,

when a remarkable discovery
was made in a Bolognese cemetery.

There he is! My word.

At last we find him.
How very wonderful.

And it was a great discovery,

because nobody...
Nobody knew anything about it.

So where actually is
Farinelli's body?

Er, is here. It's actually there?
Yes, it will be here.

And there is a project
for opening the grave,

for palaeopathologic...
Oh, yes, palaeopathology.

So you will measure his bones
and see whether he really was
long and tall?

Yes. How very interesting.

SOLEMN CHURCH MUSIC

Well, a castrato in the 18th century
was successful on the opera stage,

but there wasn't room
for all of them.

There were so many that a lot of
them found employment in the church.

# Lacrima-a... #

As a result of that, you get a
repertoire that's exactly the same.

This Porpora aria could easily be
one of betrayed love from an opera.

The Catholic church's ambiguous
attitude to castrati continued
throughout the 18th century.

In 1748,

Pope Benedict XIV

considered banning them completely,
but didn't.

Castrati were so popular - they
were the major reason why a lot
of people came to church at all,

so they realised that no castrati,
no congregation.

And this extraordinary, seductive
voice still fascinates today.

Twelve years ago,

the lost sound of the castrato
reached an international audience

with the release of
the blockbuster film, Farinelli.

HE CONTINUES TO SING
AMIDST CHEERING

The film had to
convincingly recreate the voice
of the world's greatest castrato.

To do this,

scientists at IRCAM in Paris
painstakingly spliced together

the voices of a soprano
and a countertenor,

giving the higher notes
to the woman's voice,
and the lower to the man's.

But how successful was it?

They looked at it pretty well
note by note,

not a trivial exercise at all,

cos you have to get all the levels
right and make it sound
as if it works.

The consonants have to be lined up,
so a huge job, and a very
satisfactory outcome, I think,

in terms of the film soundtrack.
Yeah, but completely different from
what we think a castrato really was.

We have a female voice at the top
end, a falsetto at the bottom end
and a castrato voice was neither.

Absolutely. You could argue that
putting a female voice anywhere near
a castrato is a strange thing to do.

So for this film,

using all the resources
of contemporary acoustic science,

David Howard is going to develop
a new method of recreating
the castrato voice.

At one level, trying
to synthesise the castrato voice

is one of those endless experiments
that never stops.

Because unlike most
scientific investigation,

we don't know what the final sound
should sound like.

Imagine a voice that combines
the sweetness of the flute

with the animated suavity
of the human larynx -

a voice that leaps and leaps,
lightly and spontaneously,

like a lark that flies through
the air and is intoxicated...

This supernaturally beautiful voice
cannot be compared
with that of any woman.

There can be no fuller
and more beautiful in tone...

.. He sang with the purity of a bell,
up to E above the treble stave...

.. Amazing swell from pianissimo
to an almost unbelievable degree
of sonority.

Now, whether we ever get
the computer to produce the sound
which will engage with my soul

and I will suddenly swoon
at the desk, I think is unlikely,

but I suspect I might get a sense
of when we're moving towards it.

The peculiar physiology
of a castrato allowed them
to do things with their voices

that no other singer could do. One
of Farinelli's arias has a phrase
that lasts for just under a minute.

In parts of that phrase,
notes are going past
at the rate of 1,000 per minute,

and no other voice
could keep up with that.

To build up a precise picture of the
voice, David Howard must understand

all the elements that formed it.
Central to that

is the castrati children's training.

What exactly these boys sang - what
notes came out of their mouths -

we cannot say.

SINGS A SCALE

A very famous singing teacher like
Nicola Porpora, who was as famous as
a teacher as he was as a composer,

would have taught, probably,
very simple exercises.

One can be taught intensely
a very few things,

very well.

One of the most extraordinary
things they had to do
was to be able to sing

with a technique called the "messa
di voce" - messa from mettere,
the Italian verb meaning to put -

and it literally means to
put the voice on the breath -

in other words, to start
as quietly as you possibly can...

.. to sustain it for several seconds
to as loud as you possibly can...

.. and then to get quieter again,
equally slowly,
to a disappearing point.

And it was always regarded at the
time as the ultimate accomplishment
for a singer.

Not being able to sing millions
of notes and do those sort of
clockwork nightingale trills,

but to sustain one note beautifully.

SUSTAINS NOTES SINGING UP THE SCALE

'The whole process of singing
training, at the larynx level,

'is firstly to develop
a very wide pitch range... '

.. secondly to develop
a way of vocal cord vibration

that is efficient in the sense that
the cords come together and stay
together for a long time in a cycle

before coming apart
and coming together again

and that ensures that the sound
comes out through the mouth

and does not disappear between
the vocal cords down to the lungs,

and thirdly, to develop the ability
to bring the vocal folds together
rapidly.

And it's the rapid closures that
produce a very wide frequency range
in the output.

That wide frequency range
gives a sound the brightness
and the brilliance

and if you then colour
that brightness and brilliance

using a concept known as resonance -
a bit like singing in the bathroom,
getting that enveloping sound -

but to do it
in a special region of frequency
between about 2,000 and 4,000 hertz

gives the voice
projection or resonance.

To demonstrate
this area of resonance,

called the singer's formant,

David Howard has developed
a new piece of software.

This display down here is showing
the frequencies on this vertical axis

and as I'm speaking, you can see the
display scrolling in from the right,
going towards the left.

So, for example, I go, "p-p-p",

and we can clearly see the sound is
emerging from the right, moving left.

And the frequency scale
between 2,000 and 4,000 hertz -

this is the magic region
that singers use to project
above the orchestra. Uh-huh.

Now, perhaps if you did me a
demonstration of what I might call
a naive sound and a projected sound,

we should see this area light up
in the spectrograph. OK.

# Aah... #

And now the trained version.

# Aa-aa-aah! #

And there we see very clearly how
your trained version lights this up,

but the untrained version
didn't light it up at all.

Now, let's try going in and out,
see what that shows up. Yes.

# Aah...

#.. AA-AA-AAH...

# Aa-aah... #

This frequency region
will be particularly important

in David Howard's
operatic castrato recreation.

Early 20th-century science has
bequeathed us a unique treasure

that should be central
to his research.

In the early 1900s,

a recording was made of
the last Papal Chapel castrato,
Alessandro Moreschi.

# Ave... #

Castrati continued to sing
in the Catholic Church

for about 100 years after they had
disappeared from the opera stage.

This is not the voice
of an operatic soloist.

So how much
can the recording tell us

about the sound of his
18th-century castrati ancestors?

It is always wonderful
to have something from the past
one can go back to.

As a scientist, one does one's best
to find out what we can use from it.

Here we have a 1904 recording
of Moreschi,

and he would have done this onto
a wax cylinder machine with a horn -

he would have had his head in a horn.
That system removes
the high frequencies,

and those high frequencies
are in the singer's formant band,
and when we look at that,

most of it is filled
with the noise of the recording

and what we do not have are
the harmonics of Moreschi's voice.

It means that
the complete voice is not there.

Part of the problem for us
with Moreschi

is that his style of singing
is very foreign to modern taste.

And the rather cloying
sentimentality of a lot of the music

sounds to many modern ears
rather distasteful.

I think one thing we've got
to be careful of is that we have
absolutely no reason to believe

that we would have liked an
18th-century castrato singing any
better. We might think we would,

but we have no evidence to prove it.

If the Moreschi recording is not
the definitive guide in this search,

will David Howard find any clues
in other, more contemporary voices?

JAZZ PIANO MUSIC

# All of me

# Come and take all of me... #

Jazz legend Jimmy Scott was born
with the hormonal disorder
Kallmann's syndrome,

which means his voice never broke.

Here, we've got a fantastic singer
with a wonderful instrument,

which in classical terms
is not trained at all,

but does absolutely everything
he could ever want it to do
in that style.

But he's singing like a female jazz
singer. That's what, to me, comes
over when you first hear this -

female jazz singing. So,
stylistically, we haven't got
castrato singing going on at all,

even though the instrument is
more or less the same - it could be
essentially a castrato instrument.

# You took the heart

# That once was mine

# Why not

# Take a-all

# Why not take a-all

# Of me? #

But sometimes a remarkable
coincidence of physiology and
musical style presents itself.

The baroque music world
is just beginning to wake up

to the voice of the extraordinary
young soprano, Michael Maniaci.

'I call myself a male soprano,
because my voice seems'

to most naturally sit
in a soprano register.

And when I went through puberty
and my voice changed,

though my cords
did lengthen and thicken somewhat,

they didn't to the extent
that most men experience.

# Exultate

# Jubilate

# O vos animae beatae

# O vos animae

# O vos animae beatae

# Exultate

# Jubilate... #

'My voice comfortably goes
to a soprano high C,

'and I feel most comfortable
singing within a two-octave range

'from about the high C
down to a middle C.

'I guess, compared
to a countertenor, my voice
would sit about a sixth higher. '

When you sing you are not using
falsetto, which surely allows you
much more flexibility. Yes.

One problem with a falsetto singing
high is that most of us find it
difficult to sing quietly. Right.

And to sing sweetly. Right.

And to avoid forcing, quite often.

Cos I know sopranistas who can sing
right up through high C,
high E flat, even.

But it tends to be one colour, one
dynamic... Loud and hard... through
the extremes of the register.

But you can sing piano, high As
and high Bs and high Cs. Yes.

I envy you that. I can sing piano
high Fs, but not high As, Bs...

I envy you everything you can do
at the bottom of your register.
Fair enough.

# Alleluja-ah

# Allelu-ujah... #

'What a wonderful sound
Michael makes when he sings.

'You hear this voice soaring up well
above the range of countertenors. '

But is he today's castrato?

I think there are two reasons
why he's not.

The first is physiological.

His voice has partially transformed.

He speaks with a voice that is not
a boy's - it is lower in pitch.

'And if we couple that with the fact
that his training as a singer

'has not been from the Farinelli
school of castrato singing -

'it's been from the modern school
of operatic singing production -

'with what we understand
of baroque singing added to it,

'but we do have an absolutely
fascinating and intriguing modern
musician interpreting this music

'in a very special way. '

# A-allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah

# Allelujah, allelujah

# Allelujah

# Allelujah! #

Armed with the evidence,

David Howard can now start work
on his new method

of electronically
synthesising the sound.

The key to the castrati, as far
as I can see, is we have boys'
vocal folds - a boy's larynx -

and a man's mouth and nose -
a man's vocal tract.

Now, to recreate something
which uses those elements,

we need to get a recording
of boys singing,

and get a recording of a man singing,

so that we can take them both apart
and reconnect them

as a boy's larynx singing
into the man's vocal tract.

The source recordings
are made in the anechoic room
at York University.

If you look round the walls,
you'll see all these foam wedges
that stick out,

and the way it works is that
any sound that is made in here,

when it reaches the wall,

will hit a wedge and remembering
that sound is reflected off
at the same angle,

it will then go into the next wedge,
and disappear right into the wall
or the ceiling.

We're going to record in here

and we have a set of wedges between
the singer and the microphone,

such that any reflection from
the floor will be taken care of
by this set of wedges,

and of course the walls and ceiling
are covered in wedges anyway.

That way, we get a clean recording
which is anechoic - no echo.

# O-mbra mai fu... #

Three boy trebles from the Minster
Choir have been chosen
for this recording -

but for this project
David Howard needs to capture

more than just
their acoustic signal.

We're going to record with a device
round the necks of the singers,

called a laryngograph, monitoring
what the vocal folds in the larynx
are doing.

The laryngograph will allow him
to separate larynx information

from vocal tract information.

#.. Soave piu. #

A MAN SINGS

# O-o...

# Ombra mai fu... #

The adult vocal tract information
comes from a young tenor,
Darren Abrahams.

# Di vegetabile... #

He has agreed not only
to sing the aria an octave low -

that is,
in the normal tenor register -

but also to see if it is possible
to sing at the boys' pitch.

# O-ombra mai fu... #

He can't use falsetto,
but has to push HIS voice

to the absolute extreme
of high tenor register.

# Cara ed amabile
So... #

Oh... no! I'll lose it.

Sure we were on an E?
I think we're on F.

Are we? Gonna go for that "cara",

starting on E?

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu. #

It's really hard, isn't it?
It's going into falsetto now.

# So...

# Soave piu-u!

# Soa-ave piu-u. #

Staggering!

The choice of Ombra Mai Fu as our
exemplar was very easily made.

It's a very well known tune.

It's also an example
of the aria di sostenuto -

the sustained tune -

which was to show off the castrato's
powers of... long legato line,

which is every bit as important
as endless semi-quavers.

To complete
the sophisticated voice synthesis,

David Howard travels to Stockholm

and the Royal Institute
of Technology's renowned Speech,
Music and Hearing Department,

where he will work with the world's
most revered voice acoustician,

Johann Sundberg,
and his colleague Sten Ternstrom.

Here we go to the top.

That's not an "ooh" any more,
it's an "aah".

'Why is it,
when we listen to computer speech,

'why is it we know it's a computer?
What do we have to do
to make that sound

'as if it's come from a human being?

'The synthesis process'

is a long, slow process,
but we are making progress.

We've moved on now to sounds

that are not a female,
they're not a child,

but they're in their range, so
at least we're in the right area.

And there's a lot
that we can change.

That's not the profile you'll get
from a strong sound, is it?

You've got less of this first
partial here... Yeah, yeah.

.. if I play that again. OK.

Now, that's quite different,
isn't it? Yeah.

Our scientists have only a few days

to reconstruct a sound that became
a museum piece two centuries ago

when the baroque world gave way
to post-revolutionary romanticism.

But strangely enough,
it was the human voice itself

that ultimately sealed
the castrato's fate.

The real coup de theatre
came in the 1820s,

when, at the end of the 1820s,
a man called Domenico Donzelli,
a tenor,

appeared on the scene,
having worked out how to make
a much more dramatic tenor sound

than there had been
in the 18th century.

# 'Na lavannara... #

And this man worked out that
if he kept his larynx down low,

he could belt right up to high C.

A bit scary, a bit dangerous,
but very exciting.

#.. O sole mio
Sta 'nfronte a te... #

After five days in Sweden, a number
of voice morphs have been developed

and now David Howard needs
to reduce his shortlist to one.

So that's an interesting effect,

but I'm not quite sure
if it's what we're after here.

No, and I'm not convinced
that's what we're after either,

because what you get with that,
to my ears, is it's very difficult
to lose the childlike qualities.

If we have a notion
that we're trying to get away
from the childlike quality,

I'm not convinced
we've achieved it there.

I do have one other
which changes that again,

and we made a recording of the tenor,
Darren, singing the piece
in the true pitch.

Yes, this is more in the direction
that I think we're looking for.

It does have that more powerful,
brash quality to it
that I think we're after.

For me, it also opens the vowels up,

it makes them brighter
and rather more Italian, in a way,

in terms of their brashness,
which seems to be a quality
people talk about.

I vote for this latter one.
Yes, I think I will too.

When this preferred morph
is complete,

David Howard brings it back
to our music location in London.

The ultimate test
for his virtual voice

will be the reaction
of the music professionals
at its premiere performance.

We've worked from the principle
that if you think of the castrato
as somebody

who was effectively endowed
with a boy's larynx, but with
a fully-fledged male vocal tract,

the question is,
can we recreate that synthetically?

MUSICAL INTRODUCTION PLAYS

# Ombra mai fu...

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Soave piu

# Soave piu. #

Well, that sure is extraordinary.
What do you think, Michael?

I think the most successful portion
of it is the very beginning -

on the extended note.

It's a very strange
and rather spooky sound.

It's a bit difficult to accompany,
because there's not a human element,

you cannot hear the breath.

Spooky is the word.
I think spooky is a very good word,

cos it is something other, and that
is an essential thing that we knew.

We did know we were after that.

One of the things
I think is important

is we get away from a soprano sound -
I don't think we're listening to a
soprano, nor to a feeble chorister.

Nor a countertenor.
Nor a countertenor.

So we have moved
into a different domain. Oh, yes.

So at least we've achieved that part
of it, but I'm not sure
we've arrived.

Perhaps it's fitting that this
telling but ghostly reconstruction

is as close as we can come
to this dead voice from a lost age.

But what we are left with is
the music that these singers made,

and the human voices
that can still sing it -

sounds of enduring
and ravishing beauty.

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu. #

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu. #

# Cara ed amabile

# Ombra mai fu

# Di vegetabile

# Cara ed amabile

# Soave piu

# Soave piu. #